You’ve just been born; you discard your eggshell and tunnel to the surface. Now you must make a mad dash for safety. Unlike sea turtles who hatch at night and head for the brightest horizon (hopefully the sea, but all too often a local fast food restaurant), you emerge during the day and head out in a random “drunkard’s walk” without any clear sense of direction, hoping to find vegetative shelter. Momma lays her nest on a steep slope, hoping you’ll take the hint and slide downward into the safety of wrack line and salt marsh grasses. But you choose the “high road,” struggling like a Mount Everest sherpa to climb the soft, sandy, high dune of Turtle Point. And then comes the landslide.
Confronting Sandy Avalanche with Neither Angst Nor Doubt
Like a clenched fist deep inside a carefully carved terrapin nest lies the egg chamber where the female has deposited her clutch 75 days earlier. When the clock chimes “emergence,” hatchlings squirm and wiggle their way free of their siblings to begin their dash for survival. Today at noon the alarm rang for Nest 280 on the high dune of Turtle Point on Lieutenant Island. Count noses, count eyes, count limbs as hatchlings get ready to sprint for freedom.
Yes. Hatching, emerging and dashing into hiding is very serious business for diamondback terrapin hatchlings. One mis-step and you become a predator snack. Still, that’s no reason to avoid an opportunity for a little fun en route to the safety of the nursery salt marsh.
Tiny 1-inch, quarter ounce diamondback terrapin hatchlings emerge from the sands of the Outer Cape and scramble against seemingly insurmountable odds and a host of hungry, impatient predators to find cover in the surrounding marsh. Restrained by neither angst nor doubt, they exhibit the epitome of an indomitable spirit to achieve success in the face of impossible obstacles.
In late August, a two-headed terrapin hatchling emerged from a nest in Eastham on the Outer Cape. Except for two heads, of course, the shell appears normal with an enlarged, split nuchal on the carapace and an extra, middle gular scute on the plastron. The left head seems to control the left two limbs and the right head appears to control the right two limbs.